Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Warmist-in-chief Salinger a 'stranger to truth' [updated]

Salinger is still seething over being peremptorily dismissed by his former employer, the Government's National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA), and is appearing before the Employment Relations Authority in an attempt to pull down truckloads of cash for the pain, hurt feelings and the bruise on his sorry arse caused by the long-overdue appearance of his employer’s boot there.

But Salinger was known less as the head of NIWA, which was what he was paid to be, and more as "New Zealand's most prominent climate alarmist," and “the voice of global warming in New Zealand.” But that wasn’t a role his employer wanted to pay for, and as NIWA’s lawyer indicated in court yesterday, it required him to put his warmism before the truth.

Here’s just some of the “wisdom” dispensed on behalf of his former employer, that back up the lawyers’ claim:

At a convention of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in New Zealand, Jim Salinger appeared to scare the crowd with news that climate change is going to cause a decline in the production of malting barley in New Zealand and particularly Australia. "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," speculated the irresponsible scaremonger, without benefit of any science.

"Regional warming" is killing NZ’s glaciers, said Salinger in November 2007. Yet figures from Salinger's own former organisation, NIWA, showed (and still show) there has been no “regional warming” at all in New Zealand (so if those glaciers are receding, it could only be because they’re psychic). I’ll say it again, no regional warming at all. Just take a look:

In April 2007, Salinger claimed that heavy rain and flooding in Northland was the direct result of global warming since, he claimed, “as climate warming occurs, the atmosphere can hold more moisture and therefore more rain falls.” But NIWA’s own figures demonstrate that there have been no local warming at all; and as meteorologist Augie Auer said at the time, "As an explanation of the cause and consequences of last week's Northland rains, Dr Salinger's statement ... is as unscientific as it is incorrect. " "So simplistic, it's silly" was how the late Dr Auer described the statement, and “the strongest argument [yet] for the disbanding of NIWA and the return of all weather matters to MetService. “

UPDATE: The hearing continues. NewstalkZB reports Salinger faced questions today “about disregarding a clear request by management to not use traditional local knowledge when compiling a climate report in the Cook Islands [traditional local knowledge!?]. Dr Salinger also admitted to doctoring an email which was sent to management regarding the issue.”

Doctoring an email would certainly put him onside with the likes of fellow warmist Phil Jones – who’s managed to mislay the entire modern temperature record. The dog apparently ate his homework.

On the other thread on General Debate, Brian raised the black-swan, which is generally what physicists called Power-Law (fat-tailed probability distributions). Power-law is pervasive in almost everything in life (eg - economics, social science) apart from its well established observational facts of it being taking place in physical science. PC objected to the definition given by Brian. I am with Brian on this.

Black-swan exists and its problems could be traced back to reasoning via induction. This is the problem with inductions as it only seek to generalize from what it has been observed and not what hasn't been seen. This problem of induction has been highlighted by Taleb (author of "Black-Swan") in recent years.

On the point with Jim Salinger, I think that NIWA was justified in firing him, because he was working at NIWA but doing the Greenpeace's campaign on their behalf while a NIWA employee. If he wanted to do that, then he should have resigned and joined Greenpeace. I think that the reason he was doing a dual role like that (one official & one non-official) was to make him appear authoritative to the public. If Dr. Salinger speaks on danger of AGW (in agreement with Greenpeace), then no one is going to challenge him, since he was a NIWA Scientist. Compare that to Dr. Chris de Freitas, whenever he makes a public comment (such as a HZ Herald Column, or TV interview), he is always being attacked (by Greenpeace & warmists) as being a denier, but Chris does more research work compared to Salinger, which he was more of a management guy at NIWA rather than a science guy.